Iconography, updatedTheaster Gates and the art of the Black Madonna

THREE young black women—one with a perfect Afro, the others all mid-century glamour in their bathing caps—lark about at the steps of a swimming pool, preparing to emerge from the water. A passing photographer may have caught the joyful moment by chance; it could also be a still from a fashion shoot. It’s an arresting picture since, in reworking the monochrome image, Theaster Gates has turned the water an orangey-red. Equally intriguing is the title: “The Madonnas” (2018). What is the connection between these bathers and depictions of Mary, most often with the infant Jesus, so familiar from Catholic churches and Old Masters collections?

The title of Mr Gates’s exhibition, which opened in Basel this month and will travel to Hanover, Munich and Milan, is “Black Madonna”, and it refers to the depiction of the Virgin Mary with black or dark skin. There are some 500 Black Madonnas—mostly Byzantine-style icons created in the 13th or 14th century—in European churches. Some are intentionally dark-skinned; others have been made so by candle smoke.

But for Mr Gates, the Black Madonna is first and foremost a black American phenomenon. The notion of a black mother of God has been powerfully resonant throughout American history, including during the civil-rights marches of the 1960s. Mr Gates first encountered the idea through a black liberation-theology group in Detroit called the Shrine of the Black Madonna, which in 1967 commissioned an 18-foot painting of the Virgin.

Comprising sculpture, video, photography and installations, the show takes as its starting point the Catholic Madonna, but all Marys and all mothers (not least his own) were on his mind as he planned the show. It goes beyond religion to celebrate “the everyday black woman”, no matter her role or occupation. What makes the artist’s tribute possible is the acquisition of thousands of images from Jet and Ebony, popular magazines printed by the Johnson Publishing Company, which for more than 70 years was the largest African-American-owned media company in America.

Founded by John H. Johnson in 1942, the company aimed to showcase black achievement. “One of its goals was to help black people understand that they are more powerful than they believe by making powerful images of them,” Mr Gates explained in the show’s notes. He has reworked almost 3,000 of the Johnson images, overlaying some with tracing paper and crop marks, to reference the (now antiquated) magazine production process. Many date from the 1950s and early 1960s, so beehive hairdos and hair-straightening rollers abound.

Mr Gates’s Madonnas take a variety of forms. The reworked Johnson prints, of which the bathers are a part, are essentially a single “Madonna” artwork. He has also plucked Maerten van Heemskerck’s “Virgin and Child in front of a Landscape” (1530)—a most unconventional example of the conventional white Madonna, who casts the viewer a knowing sideways glance—from the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel, where the show takes place. She shares the walls with his portraits and he has given the painting a second title: “The Ghetto Madonna”. He has sculpted another Madonna, too (pictured, below). A small seated figure in a large white space, Mr Gates has underlined her “everywoman” status by casting her from tar, one of his favoured materials.

Making art from archives is very much a part of Mr Gates’s oeuvre. An African-American sculptor, musician, university professor and community activist, now aged 44, he first gained recognition through an ambitious programme of social and cultural regeneration. In 2006, having taken a post at the University of Chicago, he moved to the South Side and began turning abandoned properties into community centres. When Dr Wax Records and Prairie Avenue Bookshop, much-loved local businesses, collapsed, Mr Gates bought their stock and created libraries of art, architecture, black music and black cinema. He staged soul food dinners and musical events, often performing with his band, the Black Monks of Mississippi.

Mr Gates is eager to do more than just celebrate the Johnson Publishing archive. To add to his multiple identities, the artist is now a publisher: he has created Black Madonna Press to give the Johnson images a future in book form. If the “Ghetto Madonna”, his Virgin sculpture and the prints count as three Gates Madonnas, the printing press is his fourth. It’s yet another way Mr Gates can spread his gospel.

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